


A Mouthful of Feathers

by Mithen



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-16
Updated: 2009-12-16
Packaged: 2017-10-04 11:43:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithen/pseuds/Mithen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On Gauda Prime, years before the events of "The Way Back," a brave young girl's family is slaughtered and she and her brother are enslaved by the killers.  You probably know the girl.</p><p>This is her brother's story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Mouthful of Feathers

I'm trying to sleep. I'm trying to breathe. Just breathe in and out. Slowly. I can breathe. I'm lying on my back, staring at the bunk above me. I can breathe. I'm nervous about tomorrow. No one else seems to be. That's typical.

As usual when I can't sleep, my mind drifts back to when it all started, to when my world fell apart. Not that I like to think about it, but that's where it goes. I'll go over it all again, maybe then I can sleep.

I remember my sister. Four of them held her spread-eagled on our kitchen table while the fifth dropped his trousers unceremoniously and started between her legs. The sixth one held on to me, which wasn't difficult. I wasn't even a particularly strong seven-year-old. Our mother's blood still streaked her face, which I watched as she screamed once, almost disbelievingly. Then she went silent and I saw emptiness slowly fill her eyes, sending her somewhere else. I, on the other hand, shrieked until my voice went hoarse, until all of them had their turn with her. They joked and laughed among themselves while it went on and on, discussing whether the stores in the pantry would last until they could get back to town.

"What about the boy?" the big redhead asked as the last man finished buttoning his pants.

"Dunno. He's pretty young. Will it kill him?" Mild curiosity from the more slender blond.

"Nah. I've had a few this age or so. He'll live." I had no idea what he was talking about.

I was such an idiot.

The redhead tossed me onto my parents' four-poster bed and casually ripped me out of my clothes. Then he shoved my face into the linen-covered pillow and began. I told myself I wouldn't scream, I wouldn't; in my efforts to stay silent I chewed a hole in the pillowcase. Then when I screamed anyway, the downy feathers from the pillow rushed into my mouth and throat, gagging and choking me.

I can breathe. I can breathe. Deep breaths. Stare at the ceiling. Just breathe for a bit.

My sister and I were lucky, I suppose. If you can call living on in the house your family was slaughtered in lucky. But my friend Jikky, he ended being sent to work in the new mines on what used to be his family's land, and he died in the mines, during a cave-in. Buried alive. I wasn't dead, but I thought I knew how he must have felt there, at the end. I felt that way a little every day. We were pretty enough and young enough that we were kept as house servants and "companions." Every few nights I spent with my face buried in a pillow. At first I would struggle and scream, but it didn't change anything and they seemed to enjoy it. I learned to breathe shallowly, to go limp and wait and try not to think about the cloth pressed to my face and the weight on my back.

Buried alive.

One day when I didn't respond quickly enough to some command, one of them threw me into a closet and blocked the door. It was a whim on their part, but my reaction gratified them. I howled and clawed at the door--when they let me out again, hours later, my fingernails had blood under them. I can't quite describe what happened to me in there, but the darkness seemed to crawl behind my eyes like heavy smoke, to creep into my lungs like black feathers. I could feel it prying parts of me away, feel them disappearing into it. I'm aware this sounds lunatic, but that was what it was like. I was docile and dazed after. It became their favorite punishment for me. Sometimes they would do it just for the sheer fun of it, because they liked the way I clung to them when they opened the door.

Can you break a seven-year-old? How much identity could he have to strip him of to begin with?

Most days we were busy cooking and cleaning for our "tenants" (as the blond, Thaven, liked to call themselves in a mock-Alpha accent). I tried to talk with my sister about our family, about happier times, but she merely stared through me. She tried to escape once, slipping into the woods one night. When she reached town, someone saw her, called up the house and told them their "little blonde housemaid" was in town, and was that by their leave? They beat her badly that night, but me they pummeled into unconsciousness in front of her. I couldn't leave my cot for three days. She never tried to sneak away again.

The contempt I sometimes saw in her eyes was painful. I was too weak, too cowardly. Our brothers would never have lived with this treatment. Oh, she never said anything, but I could tell. As I grew older, I would let the disdain in her look burn into me like a coal, letting it brand my soul. I deserved it.

I can't remember when Thaven started to give her shooting lessons, but I remember one of the others chaffing him about it. "Aren't you afraid she'll do us all in, Thav?"

He reached over and ruffled her hair. "Ah, she's just a little girl. She looks cute with a gun, don't she?" My sister smiled and pulled the gun up into a ready position, tilting her head coquettishly, and everyone laughed, except me. I saw the death in her eyes, waiting.

She almost went too far when she pushed for gun lessons for me as well. None of them found the image of a boy with a gun cute at all. I was shamefully relieved when Thaven made it clear that was out of the question. I didn't want to hold a gun. I remembered my brothers' glassy eyes, the blood in my mother's hair. I didn't want to feel a gun in my hands.

I wasn't interested in learning anything at all. My sister tried to teach me letters but found me an unwilling pupil. I knew she was trying to plan for our future, but for me the future stretched out before me as blank and featureless as a mud flat. Any hopes I had were mocked by my calloused fingers, by the pillow in my face, by the darkness swallowed in my throat like a scream all the time. The days and months and years crept by.

Then one night she brushed up against me as we cleaned off the table and whispered, "Tomorrow. Be ready." I lay in bed, shaking with terror and anticipation. I could have told one of them, but I didn't. That was resistance of a sort. Wasn't it? I tell myself now that it was, but I know it was a pitiful sort of resistance indeed.

The first shot rang out at dawn, jerking me out my restless doze. I didn't dare leave the room as other reports started to answer shortly after. Suddenly the redhead--Clenn--burst into the room, his eyes wild and his handgun out. He seized me without a word and hauled me out of bed. When he discovered I had grown too large to carry bodily, he gave a grunt of irritation and shoved the gun against my head, propelling me with a hand on my back through the door into the main area of the house. Sporadic gunfire continued to crackle outside. We made our tortuous way through the house to its rhythm, Clenn shoving me ahead of himself like a shield. At the doorway he paused, posing me within its frame. I saw Thaven lying on his face in the mud near the chicken shed. Another of the bandits groaned and clutched at his belly in a further corner of the yard. Another shot came from somewhere, and he stopped moving.

Clenn dragged me through the yard, keeping me between him and where the shots had seemed to be coming from. They had stopped, and a watchful silence fell over the farm. Clenn ducked his head low and close to mine, and together we walked haltingly to his flyer, parked near the house. He lurched in and pulled me after him, slamming the door shut behind me. As he started the flyer up, a bullet suddenly webbed the windshield in front of his face, and he winced and cursed, but it didn't give way. The flyer lifted delicately from the ground. As I looked down, I saw my sister break cover and run after the flyer, far below us, crying something. I pounded on the window hopelessly. Clenn was busy with the controls. If I had tried to overpower him...we might both have died, but I would have struck a blow for my family. I would have finally done something.

I did nothing.

Lost in a daze of fear and helplessness, I let Clenn bully and threaten me into staying with him as he purchased transport to Earth. If I didn't cause trouble he wouldn't go back and find my sister and kill her, though God knows he had reason to want the bitch dead, he said. He was being a nice guy, wasn't he, forgiving her and all like this? "You're lucky I've come to like you, kid," he muttered in my ear. I told myself I was obeying him to keep her safe, not because I was too afraid of what he might do to _me_ when he had hunted me down. Soon I was watching the stars pass my window as we left Gauda Prime for Earth. The room was too small and I spent the whole time clenched in an agony of terror, dazed and inarticulate.

Better not to remember that too much. Skip that part.

On Earth, I realized Clenn's proceeds from his "Gauda Prime venture," as he liked to call it, must have been substantial. He moved into a large apartment, filled with nice furniture and artwork and the latest gadgetry. He was careful to show me the high-tech security systems, making it clear that they would be equally good at keeping people out or in. I had no desire to test them. Where would I have gone, a young adolescent with no friends and no skills? I knew that the life I would find out there would be no less terrible than the one I had.

Maybe the most horrible part was that it wasn't such a bad life. Clenn had gotten some job somewhere so he left me alone in the quiet, posh apartment all day. It was a large and spacious place, all white fabric and glittering glass. I didn't have to do many chores there--the autoservos did most of it. We settled into a strange kind of domesticity. Clenn would come home from work and want me to listen while he complained about his day. We would eat dinner. Sometimes he would have guests over, and I was expected to serve drinks and be unobtrusive. Often he wanted a backrub before bed. As I grew older, he became less interested in sex with me, but he seemed to enjoy the homeliness of having someone waiting for him.

The closets there had locks, however, and he still enjoyed keeping me in them now and then--"For old times' sake," he joked once from outside the door as I gibbered inside. During those times I was still a terrified child, with cold ropes of sweat roiling around my body and the fear snaking down my throat, smothering me.

One night as he went to shove me down into the pillow, I grabbed his wrists without thinking and pushed him away. I was shocked to discover that I could do it easily, that I seemed to be as strong as him. Even more shocking was the fear in his eyes, quickly veiled. "It looks like closet time for you," he said jovially, and I went quietly. The feeling of my own sinew and muscle had frightened me almost as badly as the darkness and closeness I was shut into.

After that I suppose it was only a matter of time. Clenn made no more sexual demands, and kept his distance from me, but his temper grew over the next few weeks. He berated me for small errors--serving the wrong wine, not being quick enough with the right sympathetic sounds to his complaints.

One day he snarled at me about some perceived insolence in my tone of voice, and shoved me angrily. I fell backwards clumsily and landed hard on the glass coffee table. I felt it splinter under my weight, cutting my back. Clenn towered over me, his open hand swinging at my face. There was a jagged shard of glass in my fist, and I swung at him in a blind panic. It caught him squarely on the side of neck. I remember the shower of gore that splattered my face as I jerked my hand back in shock.

After that, I remember very little. The reports read at my trial seemed unbelievable to me. The police mentioned how the wide white living room was painted in blood, how my hands had been sliced to ribbons by the glass I wielded as I hacked at my victim. The webbing of fine white scars on my hands stood as a mute testimony to the police report, mocking the vagueness of my memories.

I only remember bits and pieces of the judge's comments at my sentencing as well. "Despite the apparent youth of the killer...victim was one of the President's trusted advisers...kindness repaid with brutality..." I do remember clearly how I had to bite back laughter at the sentence handed down.

Exile? What else had my whole life been?

Only a couple of hours to go now. Stare up and breathe. You can still breathe.

The last few months haven't been so bad. Nobody has private rooms, so there's a lot of space. I knew rape would be inevitable, but hard cold tiled shower wall on your face is a lot better than a feather pillow. I almost feel free. Ironic, that.

But I can't seem to make a connection, a real alliance, with anybody here. After years of isolation, I have no social skills, especially not the skills necessary to win over hardened criminals. I can tell from their faces that I come across as odd, as trying too hard. Lying in my bunk at the end of the day, I recall my forced laughter at people's jokes and wince. I'm a sham and everyone knows it, a child pretending to be a man. I can't even remember the crime that brought me here, my one moment of action.

A few nights ago, I had my proof. They were planning strategy in the other room, and a trick of the ventilation system brought their voices faintly but clearly to the vent by my ear. I hadn't been listening, but at the sound of my name I couldn't help but pay attention.

"He's an odd one." It was the woman. "He's so young, and seems so inexperienced. It's hard to believe he's really a vicious killer."

"Perhaps he was framed as well." Blake. The leader. "It's probably not uncommon. He could be totally innocent."

"For all our sakes, I hope he was _not_ framed," cut in the embezzler. "We need more people capable of violence, and fewer cow-eyed boys and starry idealists." There was a truly dangerous man--deadly, capable, elusive as a handful of smoke. Everything I was not. No wonder Blake relied on him so much.

"He seems eager to prove himself, and I think he deserves the chance," said Blake, and went on to other topics.

I clenched my fists and felt the scars tracing them. I was so much less innocent than he thought, and so much more innocent than I needed to be. That's when I decided it.

When Blake's escape attempt begins tomorrow, I'll do anything at all to win his trust. I'll volunteer for anything, any task he needs. I'll take control of my own life at last rather than just letting events push me where they will. I'll make my own destiny.

I'll get off this ship, I swear it. And someday, someday, I'll find my sister and I'll be able to look her in the eye and say, "I'm a man you can be proud of now."

I swear it.


End file.
